101704-forum-issue-guild-recruitment
Content ---- ---- No it absolutely doesn't Its stupid, and just makes things unnecessarily complicated. Also no you can not have my stuff I'm not quitting. | |} ---- How? The prefix tags made it easier to search! (I already posted about tags on this thread) | |} ---- ---- ---- No it doesn't It's a stupid change just delete the duplicate threads. You've literally gutted the server forums. There were a lot of server centric casual conversations happening on those threads, | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- THIS would have made sense. It just reeks of incompetence. | |} ---- ---- Yeah I'd also like links to these "requests" I'm calling BS | |} ---- ---- Scott.....might wanne tone down a little bit..... | |} ---- I can pass that information along, and see if I can't get more clarification as to the specifics of the change besides what I've already posted above (note, I'm the messenger here and was just trying to help clarify. I didn't make the change personally). | |} ---- The requests were made by a few LOUD WHINERS. That's it. It's great to know that Carbine are listening to the squeaky wheel that DOESNT need fixing. | |} ---- To be fair I have seen a lot of requests for seperating out the guild recruitment... but not sure any of those people were expecting this as the solution! Will see if I can find a link or two. Edit: Here is one link. Was on a server forum so was easy to miss if not your server. | |} ---- Pass along for them to change it back or to make sub-forums in each servers forum. As stated guilds are an important part of the community of every server, and those recruitment threads are also important to every server because usually they have way more than just simple forums recruitment going on in them. No one's going to look at an overwhelming giant list of guilds and look for freaking tags. They want the server they chose and that's it. | |} ---- Oh no I'm pissed now. You get to see Pissed Scott now. | |} ---- Don't say I didn't warn you... | |} ---- ---- How many people could find the answers to their simple problems by using Google and don't use it? That's why having to search is a bad idea. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- Have you ever worked in an industry trying to idiot proof something so they won't hurt or kill themselves (or others)? It doesn't work. They just come up with a better idiot. Put it back the way it was. There was nothing wrong with it. | |} ---- Incompetence is exactly what this particular move is full of. Yes people wanted recruitment separated out, but separated by server, not region. This was childish in its simplicity and the reaction should have been anticipated. | |} ---- ---- when we casually throw bricks at you , that is a message we want passed along. just pick up the brick and toss it vigorously at the appropriate "top men" also the reason realm forums are full of recruitment post and not community chatter is because no one of merit gives a damn about using the realm forums; or really building realm community outside of static groups for content. | |} ---- I learnt a new word today ASININE = extremely stupid or foolish, who say's games dont educate . I feel somehow more erudition now | |} ---- ---- That or do a second morning coffee thread everyday on the server forum that acts as a veiled recruitment thread. Since they want to dorce our hand... Dude Tex this has me so close to going War Siren on them it"s unreal. | |} ---- Giant red font doesn't make your point for you man. The server forum may be gutted for now, but I'll tell you, now that I have an expectation of not being drowned by recruitment threads, I think I'll actually be visiting mine more. Those threads you love so much were drowning out other conversation, not enhancing it. | |} ---- ---- Yeah man, this is pretty lame. I dunno if it's worth getting all "DCUO" up in here though. :lol: I mean, we're doing okay right now, but damn, who knows what the future holds? And what if no one bumps it for like a month, then we do ... now we're "necroing" threads and have our thread locked down for breaking the rules? Or two months? Or three? I *know* I am not the only Guildmaster willing to do pretty much whatever it takes to stay visible and relevant. It's gonna come down to who can get the most guildies to keep bumping the thread. Smaller guilds are going to be completely crammed out of the spotlight and larger guilds are going to spam-bump themselves to keep it that way. At least on the server level it's no big thing, since there are only so many guilds competing for attention. But *EVERY GUILD IN THE GAME*!?!?! Ugh. This was as good a move as removing the old "Costuming On The Fly" system. Which is to say, not a good move at all. | |} ---- ---- Is it really that hard on Evindra? I figured if people were on Evindra, they were on it generally to RP. It's not like people who are playing on Evindra aren't going to specifically be looking for a guild on our server, if anything. I mean, between PVE and PVP server otherwise? It's not a huge difference, but we are the only RP server. | |} ---- It's not hard *for us* ... at the moment. Who knows what next month will bring? I did do a fly-by through the AH/CX area last night during prime time, and to be honest, it's the first time I can remember thinking we had more people in GChat than the AH area had people. Things *are* slowing down. I'm not gloom-n-dooming or anything, but it *was* very noticeable. Regardless, having every guild in the game competing to be seen against every other guild in the game is not going to be the cup of awesome whomever thought of this terrible idea was expecting. | |} ---- ---- No. They each have their own. | |} ---- Lol or not xD Edited July 25, 2014 by Niliana | |} ---- Ok that's good then *nods* Ty for the clarification. | |} ---- Thayd's Academy Corner AH/CX/Crafting corner was packing probably 50+ people at 1am before I went to bed. If they were slowing way down, this makes slightly more sense since they can collapse everyone together. Let's face it, outside of Evindra and maybe a few of the more heavily packed servers, it does not matter what server you are on. Everything in PVP and PVE queues cross-realm except raids, which people switch servers liberally to do anyway. So why not put the recruitment all in one place? If most people don't care what server they're on, why separate out the guild recruitment forums? It's just been a very long time since servers really mattered. There was a time they were total microcosms, little islands of population that had their own slightly different cultures. It hasn't been that way in most MMORPGs for a long time, at least since server transfers were introduced in WoW. Outside of Evindra, which itself has its RP ruleset, it barely makes sense to even have other servers, much less say they need to have separate guild recruitment subforums. If what you're saying is true and they're really slowing down that much, it makes even more sense to consolidate the guild recruitment. | |} ---- No we appear to get one per region... yeahy... | |} ---- Well that's good. I blew through about 830 last night, and while it wasn't anything like "ghost town" - it did seem a lot less packed in than usual. Maybe the night got off to a slow start. ;) | |} ---- ---- Yeah, I just edited my thread to include the server in the Title. Not that it's going to go any good. Did you see how many guilds ran in and bumped first thing? | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- That's easy to answer. They won the World Cup. | |} ---- Well, this works on two levels: A: If forums are not the primary way to find a guild nowadays in the era of modern social media (they aren't) B: If realms no longer really matter and cross-realm recruiting is the norm rather than the exception (it is) Both of these would be completely invalidated by one possibility, though: C: If despite A and B, there is still enough guild recruitment and population in this game that one forum is going to be far too cluttered. I have a feeling C might be the case, if not today, than definitely in the future. IF this game grows at all over time, this solution will eventually become completely inadequate. Well, I know this much; I hate being in a packed crowd trying to craft. I do as much as I can at my house, and Carbine's doing what they can to move more functions there. Academy Corner is for poor students, not well-funded assas-.. I mean, businesspeople. | |} ---- Oh, see ... now that's racist. EQUALITY!!!!! ;) | |} ---- ---- I disagree. This game especially is not PuG friendly and finding the right bunch of people on a server type and server you enjoy is important. This new system neutars small guilds completely | |} ---- Or even guilds who are looking for more people to join their ranks. I'm on Lightspire and we're looking for more dps to join our ranks for progression and this has completely cut off our chances. :( | |} ---- :P I have a sneaking suspicion their forum mod just set things up right from the start. Efficiency and all that... So can the rest of us get the same level of organisation now? *have still not put the Chua down* | |} ---- Forums themselves are ancient forms of social media. I know I could have, if I'd wanted to, been in a guild already without ever having checked the forums. And we have to be honest, forums are old hat themselves. We are a small portion of the actual playerbase that consider this a primary form of communication for fans of the game. I mean, five years ago, that might have been untrue, but these days forums are for a lot of us old fogies that never made the leap completely to the new bevy of social media, and are trying to follow links from guild recruitment threads here to the actual guild forums. Unless there are a complete deluge of threads in that one forum, I don't see this being a crippling problem. | |} ---- A majority of my members I've recruited through forums. Your argument? invalid. | |} ---- ---- Dunno if it's been posted yet, but a big reason was to hide the lack of activity on the dead servers and smash it all together to create increased perceived activity. Like the reverse of instancing. Or zones. Or line-of-sight. | |} ---- That was not one of the reasons. Please do not outright lie about why this change was implemented. - Team WildStar | |} ---- Well since you said please, I won't. IN MY OPINION, one of the big reasons was to hide the lack of activity on the dead servers and smash it all together to create increased perceived activity. Whether this was or was not one of the actual reasons, that's certainly an effect that has taken place. | |} ---- Then how about a good reason that server specific sub-forums weren't created for guild recruitment instead of mashing hundreds of guild recruitment posts together. We have recruited well over 80% of our guild members from the forums. This won't happen any more even with tags. This was a bad change and one of the very few things I would complain about in this game. | |} ---- This. It's almost like they want these guilds to die off and have only the big ones still playing (in my opinion). | |} ---- ---- Okay, since you're answering questions. How come the non english speaking part of the realms have guild recruitment in their realm subforum and we english speaking servers don't? I think a majority of the complaints here have to deal with the fact that everyone's is mushed together- which makes NO sense. | |} ---- So you can post on the realm forums to... 1) Advertise your tradeskill. 2) Personally brag about stuff (no guild bragging allowed, that's guild forums). 3) Politely trash-talk people with snobbery and your pinkie extended. 4) Talk about the latest teleporting bot you've seen. Guilds are a huge part of any online game, this really makes very little sense. | |} ---- They're run by a completely different team. I know that's not the answer you're looking for - but that's the plain and simple of it. Please understand I *am* bringing up these comments and concerns in my report, I can't promise anything will change but it was just supposed to be something nice (as you can see by the response on the Pergo forums) and it snowballed into something much larger. The EN team is not in yet, and these things need some time to be discussed. :) - Team WildStar | |} ---- Thanks for being the messenger, Chillia. I know that's a rough spot, nobody wants to give others bad news, especially about a reaction to something they did. I do appreciate how you handle your position. | |} ---- Thank you. One more question. I'm the guild master of the largest and most active guild on Lightspire EU. We tend to host server wide events and invite people over, but it's all under the Venus Rising tag. Am I still allowed to post rp events involving my guild on the general part of our server forums? | |} ---- I'm with Wiawyr on this one. We do appreciate the communication and don't mean to send all this rage at you. This was a ridiculous change that didn't need to be made and it really does affect the one thing that keeps a lot of people playing these kinds of games, guild mates. With the level of difficulty in this game, there will be a lot of burnout and turnover. Without a quick view of guilds on your server, it will cripple recruitment. | |} ---- Please do! Yes, that's exactly what we want to happen on them. | |} ---- Alright cool. I wasn't too sure if I'd get a warning for saying Venus Rising invites you to partake in such and such Thank you for the clarification. While I do appreciate that the teams were trying to do something nice, it just feels a little half assed on this side. | |} ---- Al right. Can we get the German mod to organize the English speaking guild sections? They seem to know what they're doing. It would be a MUCH better option to have made separate recruitment sub-forums for each realm, than what we have now. This is starting to remarkably remind me of Blizzard's stance of "No, no, no, no, no, no. You can't possibly want THAT. You don't know what you want. Let us tell you what you want." And let me tell you, that's a very scary feeling. Forum recruitment is still a very important part of any realm community. Merging them all together is a mistake. Please listen. | |} ---- It's hard to deal with sometimes, but it is true that forum users are a dying breed. Of the probably 20-30 people in my little circle that plays Wildstar, I'm the only one here. Trafficestimator.com shows the domain forums.wildstar-online.com has received about 2,396,200 visits (not visitors) in the last 30 days to all parts of the domain, not to just guild recruitment. Divide that up, and you get a number just shy of 80k visits a day. Which means every time Wildstar's team posts to their twitter feed, they roughly reach 12,000 more people in one post than their forums get views in a whole day. They have 256k likes on Facebook (God only knows how many are following). Even the Reddit for the month between June and July is at about 7million for the month. I mean, we have to face facts. I don't like Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter, but I'm under no illusion that we constitute even a large minority of Wildstar players here on the forums. There may be enough to invite people to your guild, but obviously these forums are a very small pond. You'd be better off advertising on their FB, Reddit, or Twitter than posting here if you were actually trying to get volume. I don't know what else to tell you, it's been this way at least for five years now. Companies like NCSoft keep forums up specifically for those of us who never leapt into the new social mediasphere, so at least the people you attract on here will be like-minded, usually. However, if Carbine feels like their guild recruitment format is a good move, it's probably because they've looked at our forum traffic and thought that the best shot for actually recruiting for a guild was on one page, rather than one per server. I don't have any reason to doubt them out of hand. | |} ---- 300 members pulled into the guild since closed beta begs to differ. A very small percentage of our guildies actually come from in the game, twitter, reddit (that recruitment post is on page 30 and gets downvoted by people who hate casuals), other media sites. Probably 25 members came from sources other than the forums here. So nope, not a dying breed, not a small pond. Again, argument invalid. A majority of our applications on our website involve we saw your recruitment post on the official forums and followed your links here cause you sound like the guild for us. | |} ---- Except for the fact that guild recruitment via realm forums has been a successful thing since EverQuest and in every game thereafter. Well, it's been successful for guilds who actually stick around longer than a month. For the fly by night guilds, spamming in game channels seems to work. | |} ---- I know a large number of people, friends, current and previous guildies included, who don't frequent the forums except for when they need to - recruitment being the top reason to do so (and various guild announcements, news etc. as far as guild forums are concerned). You really want a static media for this purpose, spamming twitter, reddit or facebook seems like a lackluster way to go about it. Most guilds advertise in the game chat nowadays, linking to their forums - perhaps elaborating on that aspect, adding customization and functionality to the game UI would be a better choice. What I can foresee happening on the forums after this change is a sleuth of topics with one question or another relating to guilds and recruitment. | |} ---- And what I'm saying isn't that there aren't people, but that the idea that Carbine couldn't have thought this through and come to this conclusion is incorrect. People think this came out of nowhere, but I can see exactly where this came from. And honestly, unless that forum is literally flooded (which, as I stated in the original post you quoted, is a possibility) and then it's impossible to recruit on that one page for anyone, it isn't going to be a problem. Essentially, the forum mandate has nothing to do with "your" guild or "our" forum as much as Carbine looked at usage statistics and figured that we didn't constitute enough traffic to justify that level of fragmentation. I'm sorry if you feel that's insulting; that's just how it is. None of the people in my little IRL Wildstar-playing circle came here to find a guild (or have come here for any reason), and though I'm here I wouldn't look for a guild here (I've got enough standing in-game offers). I can completely see why they'd think this is logical. The only rational reason to change it would be if normal traffic dictated otherwise; and if it does, more power to you. But this wasn't just a shot in the dark, this was done for a pretty obvious and cogent reason. | |} ---- Honestly, bolded part added by me for emphasis, I agree with that most. I haven't picked a guild anywhere yet due to my faction-hopping ways, but if I had, I would have already joined guilds I met in-game. It's still the #1 most effective way to recruit for your guild. In-game functionality would probably be the best since Wildstar fans frequent many different medias, but everyone plays the game. | |} ---- ---- If you are looking strictly for quantity, this is true. Most of those guilds advertising in-game will be gone in a month or two. People who visit forums, generally are the ones who also read up on their class, rotations, gearing, strategies and whatnot. These are the kind of people most good guilds want. They don't want to recruit every Bob, Joe and Sally who thinks their guild name is "kewl". Funny thing about statistics and reports. Without going into too much detail, my wife was in the hospital last year. I ended up kicking a pair of smug doctors out of her hospital bed as they sat there and told me she was fine and she didn't need any more fluid than what she was getting via her painkilling medicine. All their "reports" looked fine. When you actually looked at her with her sunken eyes, slurry speech and fatigue, you could easily tell she was dehydrated. Even the nurse brought it up to them. Nope, the reports look fine, nothing is wrong. The next morning her kidneys started to fail. They gave her a bunch of IV fluid and within hours, she was back to normal. You don't need a report to see what's going on. You just need to open your eyes. | |} ---- Don't want to sound abrasive, I understand why you're saying what you're saying. But there is nothing effective about crippling your own forums for the purposes of recruitment, even if all the other media is far more pervasive for that purpose. (Which it arguably isn't, but that's beside the point.) They've crippled the recruitment power of all their English speaking guilds using forums by this change. This will negatively affect especially all the smaller guilds and guilds from not so populated realms. They've now moved a piece that will contribute to population imbalance in the long run. This is not okay. The better change would have been to implement a recruitment sub-forum for each realm (as it already exists on the German forums and seems to be running just fine). This would leave realm communities intact as they are, and work better in the attempt to widen the realm forums usage. | |} ---- Well, presently, there are forums up on the very front page that have been last posted on about 2.5 hours ago, and this is just after everyone found out about the change. We'll see what kind of traffic it gets at peak. On the other hand, I agree that you'd think people who read forums are the kinds of people you really want in your guild. Then again, I read forums, I would think that. I doubt that's going to be an unpopular sentiment here among people who are on the forums during the day at work or home contributing to this conversation. I'm also very aware that it's probably a little discriminatory and probably wrong, considering how many decent people I know that think forums are a waste of time. But as I said, we'll have to see how this all settles in. I can't imagine that, if at peak, we're filling the first two pages of that subforum with guild recruitment pages getting constantly updated with topical content that it will stand as it is. Obviously, Carbine looked at our current traffic across all realms and figured that wouldn't be the case. Forums aren't necessarily how most younger people (probably a larger demographic of the game than we'd admit) check in or socialize, so we're less of a force than you might think. I feel sometimes people on these forums get the impression we're a fair representation of the larger game, when we're actually a niche population and a demographic in and of ourselves. The kind of people who find Twitter communication frivolous, I suppose. You don't sound abrasive, either that or I've become pretty well immune to it by now. I think, as I said, we have to wait to see how crippled it actually is considering precisely what you said; most people I know are recruited in-game by in-game friends or colleagues they run with. Forums represent a small minority of a minority of the game population, and realm communities, outside the RP realms, are pretty well nonexistent. The people coming to a forum looking for a guild, with a few exceptions, have little to no issue abandoning their server to join the guild they want to join. If that wasn't the case (if it was old-school vanilla-WoW and you had to reroll), I'd agree with you. But for the most part, I can't say that the idea of a "server" as a community holds much weight anymore. Account friends mean we can talk across server barriers to other people and the queues mean we are very often running, in PVP or PVE, with people from other servers until we find a guild in game. I'm not entirely sure I like any of these things, don't get me wrong. I liked having the server communities I had in the old days and knowing people would largely stay and try to improve the situation rather than just leaving. I like forums more than other forms of social media because I feel it gives us a better way to communicate complex ideas using evidence and explanation. But the reality of the situation is that Carbine probably has every reason to think that the current situation will serve them just fine. Will they say it's better to keep the communities fragmented so that anyone who isn't married to their server has to visit the pages of every individual subforum to find the right guild? It goes both ways; there is every reason to think they made the right call here until they're proven otherwise. If they are, I'll completely support the change, but I'm not ready to jump down Carbine's throat because they don't think we're quite as diverse as we do. | |} ---- This change would have been great if the "use first tag as Prefix" check box was visible by every forum group. That way people could just click on the prefix of a realm they wanted to look for a guild on and it would have displayed them all in a new page. But! Always a But....the stupid check box isn't visible by everyone so it makes this change pointless and I apologize for that mistake. Through out the day I'll start adding recruitment sub forums to each realm forum. Hopefully that will be an agreeable solution to this. | |} ---- That would be a most excellent fix and you will have the thanks and appreciation of generations for it! Well, at least our thanks and appreciation. Who the hell knows what the next generation is going to be doing. | |} ---- Well that should fix the issue at least. :) Now we can be a big happy family again. | |} ---- Thank you. That was fast. | |} ---- That's the best case scenario. Thanks for making it happen! | |} ---- Intricate, no, but obviously it doesn't take that much to make the change you wanted. They intentionally went the other way for a reason. It will be interesting to see whether the universal or realm-specific subforums become the go-to place to look for guilds. | |} ---- Damn :/ I liked the ability to be able to browse everyone's recruitment posts - opens the door for those who are looking to move to another server, and gives those of us on smaller servers more visibility. | |} ---- Thank you! <3 | |} ---- Well, they didn't say they were going to remove the guild recruitment NA subforum, so you may still have your forum. | |} ---- ---- Thank you! This will be better! | |} ---- ---- Punch and Pie an option? | |} ---- You're just never happy, are you?! | |} ---- Sadly no :( Hugs? lol | |} ---- I think that's a great solution (and the one that should have been implemented in the first place.) With recruitment posts entirely outside of the realm forums, there'd be no reason for a lot of users to visit them. This way, everyone still heads to their realm forums, but there's less clutter for those who want to talk about other things. | |} ---- /hugs | |} ---- this just made my day :D thanks! /hugs | |} ---- /hugs everyone | |} ---- ---- It's cool we won, we're getting (or got rather) Guild recruitment sub-forums on every server forum. | |} ---- ---- So I guess just adding a guild recruitment subsection on each realm forum in order to "keep it local" without drowning out the chit-chat made too much sense? Edit> saw the last page and it looks that it did make sense after all? :P | |} ---- ---- I knew I liked you for a reason... | |} ---- When I started reading at the beginning of the thread this was the first thing that I thought... "Why not just make them sub forums if you want to separate?" It is a lot cleaner and easier to use for all involved. | |} ---- ---- Except this had nothing to do with Devs, this was the Community team, and yes it could have been the end of the world as without good Guild recruitment you can't recruit people for Raids which is almost the the entire point of this game. What's the matter Bro U mad I actually got results? | |} ---- Curious... I'm on your server never heard of your guild till just this forum post. But each to their own | |} ---- ---- Nope, you wasted the mods time. Good for you. It was a stupid excuse to make a scene on the forums. Most of your other posts are fun Scott, and I like most of them, so no hard feelings. But this was a bad post and you should feel bad for being part of the W* communities problem for this short period in time. Most folks find a guild in-game or through IRL friends / websites. Consolidating the recruitment spam was a good idea, complaining that you had to click 2 buttons and enter your server into a search bar is not. It screams millennial entitlement. The above is my personal opinion; your mileage may vary. The number of QQ'rs on these forums is too cupcaking high, and as much as I like your other posts Scott, that's no excuse for being a part of the problem for such a non-issue. -Naz | |} ---- I don't feel it was a non-issue and we have never once to my knowledge recruited in game all of our people have come from the forums, I actually find in game Guild advertising more annoying and a Hinderance than Forum Advertising. By consolidating all those threads together they made it a mess small guilds would have been eaten alive by the big guilds that had the members to keep bumping the threads and drowning out the smaller ones. The noise I made, now got us much more functional separation, people can still find the guilds on the server they want without having to use clunky tools (because let's be honest the search function on this site blows.) Thanks to my noise the recruitment posts are in their communities where they belong, and are also separate so people won't have to complain about the "spam" (which I still want proof that ever even happened.) It was far more important than you give it credit for. I know a lot of guilds that recruit via forum only, even some of the top guilds only recruit via Forum and their website. Most of them won't broadcast in game. | |} ---- Awesome move, ty :) (now could some mods move back the threads from the giant pool back to their respective servers? Should be easy to see where they came from they all say their server names in their OP's) | |} ---- We've been working on it, but it's much slower going than the initial mass move from yesterday. Plus, some threads have not updated their tags and don't have the server in the title, so it makes it a little difficult. Please update the tags and/or report threads for moving so we can get them in the proper place. | |} ---- ---- Oh awesome, the Mods have an Easter Egg Hunt Puzzle to solve this week. How fun :P | |} ---- Have to keep ourselves entertained somehow. ;) | |} ---- Well, that sucks. :/ Don't you guys have admin tools that allow you to undo those mass moves back to their originating forums? Had those available on all the forums I was admin of, poke the main man perhaps? If you have to do it by hand...it's going to take a while indeed. Thanks for making the change and for listening, regardless. | |} ---- Because logic not even once | |} ---- ---- To be fair it was a horrible Idea and you guys did kind of make the mess yourselves, why didn't you post a poll or ask opinions and save some work XD Next time you want to do something that drastic Poll first! | |} ---- Fixed now. You can now see and read them with out logging in. | |} ----